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Much sought-after Danish architect Bjarke Ingels (one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People) embarks on his most ambitious project yet, NYC’s new World Trade Center, in the energetic documentary BIG TIME.

The puckish Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has built his career on defying convention and distancing himself from his peers. He is 39 years old, founder of a company pretentiously and provocatively called BIG and is on his definite way to becoming one of the world’s most innovative and successful contemporary architects. According to The Wall Street Journal he has ‘rapidly become one of the design world’s biggest stars’.

Bjarke Ingels’ ambitions are extremely high. He wants to build the most significant and memorable building of his era. Even though he is currently building a spectacular skyscraper in New York he longs to design a building that can truly be considered as one of the great buildings in the world – a building that will shape the future of architecture. Nothing less. Nothing is impossible.

Film-maker Kaspar Astrup Schröder – who met Ingels through his wife – captures an intimate portrait of the architect as he decamps from Copenhagen to New York to set up BIG’s second studio, suffers from debilitating health problems and falls in love with architect Ruth Otero.

“On the surface, Bjarke Ingels’ life may seem like a piece of cake, but the film conveys some of the many challenges that follow with a life as one the world’s greatest living architects,” said Astrup Schröder.

“It has been a challenge to keep up with everything going on with Bjarke and his company. While doing so, I discovered how much pressure Bjarke was under,” he continued. “It was as if he had put himself in the driver’s seat in a train, which could never stop, and now he had to lay the tracks while managing the steering wheel.”

“I’ve been very interested from the beginning in trying to make it feel more like a film than a documentary,” Ingels told Dezeen, “and in trying to give it a story arc so there was an emotional investment with the characters, and through that emotional investment in the characters you would listen to some of the things they say about architecture.”